The Alyona Showhas ended. Say what you will (and by this I mean “make every entirely reasonable critique of RT”) about the sources of funding and oversight, Alyona was willing to have guests and tackle subjects that could be found nowhere else on television. I can’t think of another show of its type that would do a short segment about the Zumwalt class destroyer. Best wishes to Alyona and her producer in their next endeavor.

Speaking of Russia, see this Dan Nexon post on the origins of Romney’s anti-Russia rhetoric. I’d place my bets on numbers 2 and 3; anti-Russia sentiment is convenient, low stakes rhetoric for Romney, and those surrounding him seem resoundingly committed to a (hysterical) anti-Moscow position. I’m not sure I’d use the term “steeped,” because I don’t have a sense of what Romney actually thinks; the think tank network that effectively constitutes the modern Republican foreign policy establishment is in many ways structured to prevent candidates from straying from a very narrow strip of “hawkish” orthodoxy.

Nexon’s number 4, I think, is more plausible than it appears. For a very powerful (though perhaps numerically small) segment of Republicans (call it the Dick Cheney faction if you want), they see the US as primarily as a sort of platform for energy corporations (properly freedom-loving capitalist energy corporations, of course). Thus, in this view, the problem with Russia is that Putin Inc. is a competitor to those freedom-loving energy corporations.

As a Massachusetts voter who lived through the 4-year term of Gov. Romney (who spent the last 2 years in New Hampshire and Iowa), I would tell you that what Romney thinks is basically, “What can I say now that will help me become President?” It’s pretty clear from his actions as Governor that he was interested in having the job, not doing the job.

The major component of any Republican’s ‘foreign policy’ profile requires that he make bellicose speeches about some enemy that is a threat and to declare that the Democrat is ‘soft’ and ‘weak’ with respect to that enemy’s threat. In cases where there is no enemy or threat, the Democrat is soft, weak, and naive for failing to acknowledge that enemy’s threat.

Look, Republican voters do not know much about anything to do with the state of the human race outside of their small, homogeneous social circles. They know even less about the world outside of the United States. So it’s pretty simple to tell them that there is an enemy and that they should be afraid. They are already afraid of so much, they just need a name or a phrase to associate with their fears.

So the Republican candidate invariably gives bellicose speeches about countries that everybody hates, like Iran, or imaginary threats, like Russian resurgence.

Nexon is very generous in his #2 – heh heh, heh heh – by attributing the shift from a focus on Islamism to one on Russia as an intellectually-derived exercise.

Romney wants to hit the old “Democrats are soft on ___________” button, like Cheney and Rove did, but there is no way in hell the Republicans are going to challenge him directly on issues of terrorism and the Islamic world. So, Russia makes the best available stand-in.